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Sunday, December 27, 2009

My stupidity almost cost me $50

I flew back from my mom's yesterday, and managed to leave my apartment keys and my work ID in the box I packed up for her to ship to me. My super has an extra key, but the likelihood of finding him on a Saturday night was not good. I was prepared to shell out around $50 of my Christmas money for a locksmith.

Miraculously, I was able to get ahold of the super, who was awesome enough to leave his other job to drive back to Queens to let me in. He went out of his way and it was totally my mistake.

I owe him something, homebaked cookies at least. Peanut pointed out that his willingness to help might have been due in part to our card with $60 in it that we put in his mailbox before we went on vacation, and that's probably the case. I still feel like I owe him something.

4 comments:

I don't think you actually owe him anything, but if you do feel like getting him something, then I do think something simple like the homebaked goods would be perfect. It shows that you genuinely appreciate his act of kindness without "putting a price" on how much it is worth.

Most people would love to get home-baked cookies. A nice note acknowledging the man's kindness would be good, too.I manage a small apartment building and have on more than one occasion gone out of my way to help tenants. I have never received so much as a Christmas card. :-(Yesterday the building owner told me that one of the tenants sent "such a nice letter" with last month's rent, wishing them a happy holiday and telling them how glad he was to live in the building. She was so impressed by how nice he is. This is the same guy who once called me at 2 a.m. from out of town to say he'd been towed and needed a copy of the car title before he could reclaim his vehicle -- so would I get up and let a friend of his into the apartment so he could retrieve and fax the title? I also let the friend, whom I do not know, use the fax machine in my apartment since no fax places were open at that hour. This took about two hours out of my much-needed sleep -- I have two part-time jobs and at that time was a 50-year-old full-time student -- by the time the guy got there, found the title and faxed it.No thank-you note. No verbal thank-you when I saw him in the hallway. Believe me, I wouldn't have turned down cookies, either.

The super was out of town for New Years, but when my boyfriend ran into him the other day he thanked the super for helping me as well, and now that I know he's back I'm definitely baking cookies for him this weekend.

Tipping doormen, supers and other service staff is always a big discussion in New York around the holidays and there's a lot of pressure to do it because the other tenants are. It's hard, you know--these people get a salary that I'm contributing towards and it's their JOB to do things like fix my broken radiator or whatever. No one gives me cookies for doing my job and some of the NY Times articles make it seem like doormen and supers are making more than I am. But we gave him a card and some money anyway, and then he went above and beyond and that deserves cookies, I think.

Spare Change

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